Idleness

To begin by belaboring the obvious: life never turns out the way we thought it would. Occasionaly one hears a person say something like "As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a musician," and if that person is a musician, we may briefly be tempted to think that his or her particular life turned out the way he or she thought it would, and we're mightily impressed, perhaps envious. But of course the precise nature of being-a-musician no doubt was not what the person imagined, and being-a-musician is only one part of that whole life. So even in rare cases where plans and dreams turn out just the way they were supposed to, they really didn't, on closer inspection. How could they?

One of my favorite Henry James stories (I am not a huge James fan, no offense to those who are) is "The Beast in the Jungle." (If you haven't read it and think you might one day read it, know that I'm about to expose the basic twist of the story.) The main character spends his life waiting for the big thing that he feels will happen in his life to happen, and ultimately the big thing turns out to be the revelation that he has wasted his life waiting for this big thing to happen. Oops. I hate when that sort of thing happens; it's so ironic.


Americans, of course, are among those humans most obsessed with plans and executing plans, dreams and making dreams "come true." The ambition-syndrome and the idea that one can be self-made are injected into our psyches early. That's not necessarily an utterly bad thing. Hope is a good thing. Also, if one is completely without ambition, one is likely to create an awful lot of work for other people. Nonetheless, "idleness" seems to make Americans nervous, even though our greatest secular holiday is Super Bowl Day, when a vast percentage of the population sits or lies down for several hours, looking at a screen, drinking a brain-numbing beverage, and shoveling food in the pie-hole. Of course, in the minds of those who are watching the Super Bowl, they are being active, not idle. They are watching the Super Bowl! . . .


And idleness is supposed to be the devil's workshop. More likely candidates for the devil's workshop, I think, are dictatorships, political parties, Hollywood, cutely decorated bed-and-breakfasts, the industry known as lobbying, the industry known as "fashion," racism, the military-industrial complex which that known radical, President Dwight Eisenhower, feared, and the Home Shopping Network--to name just a few.

Circuitously, that is to say, idly, I have sauntered to my point, assuming I had one: praise for Robert Bridges' little poem, "The Idle Life I Lead." Bridges is best known now not for anything he wrote but for having championed the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bridges is known among students of prosody for having written in syllabics, even though syllabics (counting syllables in a line, regardless of stresses) seem to work better with Latin poetry than with stress-heavy English. In any event, here is the poem, which is written not in syllabics but in iambic meter:


The Idle Life I Lead


The idle life I lead
Is like a pleasant sleep,
Wherein I rest and heed
The dreams that by me sweep.


And still of all my dreams
In turn so swiftly past,
Each in its fancy seems
A nobler than the last.


And every eve I say,
Noting my step in bliss,
That I have known no day
In all my life like this.



I love this poem because it celebrates idelness without making a big deal about celebrating idleness. It doesn't imply "Look how unorthodox I am by celebrating idleness!" There is a Zen-like quality to the poem, more palpable and genuine than it would have been if Bridges had set out to write a Zen poem. I suppose that if someone sets out to write a Zen poem, he or she has made the fatal first mistake (setting out), and will thereby have pre-rendered the poem un-Zen-like. I also see--or perhaps I am merely reading this into the poem--a certain lovely humility in Bridges' verses here. The speaker of this poem is not in charge of his fate, has not ambitiously chosen not to be ambitious. Instead he seems simply to take note of the fact that he knows no day in all his life like any day that has come before. That is the way this thing called experience, given to us by who knows what or whom, is actually experienced. Each day comes to us, including the last day. At some fundamental level, the most ambitious, accomplished, famous, driven, powerful, and influential of humans are idle. (Of course, I wish that people like Adolf Hitler and Joseph McCarthy had been even more idle.) I love the way Bridges' poem illuminates "idleness" in a new way. Idleness is not laziness. Idleness is being. If you're like me, just-being makes you anxious. You feel as if you should be doing something. Bridges' poem seems to suggest that ideless is doing something. I promise, however, that if someone asks me to take out the garbage (for instance), I won't try to get out of doing so by saying, "I can't because I'm doing something--I'm busy here in a state of idleness, and if you don't believe me, read this poem." Robert Bridges was born in 1844 and died in 1930.